50. Cass
CASS
“It won’t all be bad, you know,” says DeMaris, with another beaming smile like he really does believe that that’s an awfully kind form of reassurance. “You have several options, and some of them are downright pleasant.”
“Oh, that’s a relief,” I snap. “I was so worried that this was going to end badly for me.”
He laughs softly. He laughs at almost everything I say, I’m noticing. It feels like a very well-rehearsed act. I’m sure some voters find it charming.
I, however, find myself wanting to staple his mouth closed.
But the geometry of the room is really against me getting close enough to do that.
It’s also set against me getting as far away from him as I’d like to.
The door at my back is locked, the window is barred, and all the furniture is bolted to the floor so it can’t be weaponized.
I’m “stuck up piss creek without a paddle,” as Giana used to say.
“Are you sure you won’t sit?” he presses.
“I think I’m just fine where I am.” I inch back into the corner just to be sure.
“Very well then. Have it your way, honey.” He uncrosses his ankle and recrosses the other one over it. “Standing’s fine. You’ve certainly got the legs for it.”
God, he is gross. I’d forgotten, in the day-and-a-half since I last had to be near a man like this, just how gross they are. The cologne. The piggy little eyes doing that constant inventory of all my female bits and pieces. The pet names. Sweetheart. Honey.
All of it greased with the unshakable confidence that whatever room he’s in is his .
“Can you just get on with whatever you came here to do?” I ask.
“You’re quite right. Let’s not waste each other’s time,” he agrees.
“I’m a busy man, and you’ve got… well, laundry to fold.
So here’s what’s going to happen, Cassandra.
You’re going to plead guilty to murder in the second degree.
My people will arrange a deal with the district attorney’s office by the end of the week—I have some friends over there, you might be surprised to learn—and you’ll do fifteen years upstate.
With good behavior, you’ll see daylight at thirty-eight.
Forty, tops. I daresay that’s plenty of time to find yourself a nice, relaxing hobby to make the years pass by that much faster. Pottery, maybe. Bird-watching.”
He’s got this pleasant, banal drone in his voice that reminds me of a waiter at a fine dining restaurant.
The veal is lovely.
The wine is French.
The fifteen-year prison sentence comes highly recommended.
I wish like hell that part of me wasn’t actually considering the offer. I mean, who, exactly, is in my corner right now? Let’s take stock.
My husband: dead, thank God.
My sister: dead, not thank God.
My cousin Dani: well-meaning, but definitely out-gunned by a long shot.
My partner-in-murder, my Blue-Eyed Bastard, the man who promised me the world: gone. Bailed out and vanished. Not so much as a see ya later on his way out the door.
So in a really sick way, there’s an argument that this is my best-case scenario.
Fifteen years… The baby would be in middle school by then.
Awkward and gangly and with many questions, I’m sure—but alive.
Alive and free. Raised by Dani, maybe, in a tidy walk-up in Astoria with a fireman uncle who’d teach her how to throw a baseball and be kind to others.
It’s an option. A grimy, awful, fifteen-years-of-hell option.
But still. An option.
Which is how I should’ve known there would be a catch.
DeMaris does a small, sympathetic click of his tongue, as if he can hear me getting tempted.
“Now, there is one small unfortunate wrinkle.” He almost sounds genuinely regretful.
“The pregnancy, I fear, isn’t going to make it.
These things happen, especially under the kind of stress incarceration imposes on a woman in her first trimester.
There’ll be some bleeding, a trip to the infirmary, and a visit from the warden to pass along his condolences. Some women find that comforting.”
I keep myself plastered to the cinderblock wall behind me, because if I don’t, I’m going to slide down the wall like wet paint. The maroon coverlet looks suddenly nauseating, the color of old blood.
“Could you repeat that bit, please?”
DeMaris tilts his head to the side. “I know it’s a lot, dear.
I’m just outlining what’s medically plausible in a facility like this.
So many tough things about the penitentiary system: stress, malnutrition…
a little something slipped into the morning meds…
Nature takes its course. Nobody looks twice at a miscarriage in lockup. ”
My bean, my blueberry, my precious little poppy seed… Hello, little thing… just… gone?
“You’re going to kill my baby,” I state.
“I’m going to make it possible ,” he corrects, “for you to make a sensible choice.”
I bite the inside of my cheek until I taste blood, because if I cry now, I’m done for.
Keep your mask on, girl, I beg myself. You’re not beaten just yet.
“I really am sorry,” he says. “All good things come at a price. Believe me: The alternative was much messier, and I do hate mess. I lost an old friend to mess last week. Two old friends, if we’re counting Suze, which I do.”
“Are you talking about Bill and Susan?”
He nods and gazes wistfully into the distance while fiddling with his cufflink.
“Bill was the best of us, in his way. A sentimentalist. He kept records , Cassandra. Can you imagine? In this business? Like a little stash of love letters from his friends and colleagues. If it weren’t so damned stupid, it would almost make you fond of the man. ”
“Oh” is the most I can muster up.
“Your husband is a tough loss as well. Raymond was useful to me for a long time,” he goes on.
I don’t know who he’s talking to now, but it isn’t me, not really.
I get the feeling he’s simply talking to hear himself speak.
“He was my front of house, you see. Good-looking man. People liked him. He took the meetings I couldn’t take, signed the papers I couldn’t sign, and the firm laundered exactly as much money as I asked it to, no more and no less.
For a while, at least. Then Raymond got it into his head that he was the chef and not the busboy.
He started skimming. And we can’t have that. No, no, dear me, no.”
He clucks his tongue again as he shakes his head.
“So Raymond had to go. That was already decided, well before any of this. The Caymans trip was meant to handle it cleanly. But then Raymond started panicking, and panicking men do panicky things. One of those things was leaning on Bill to find a way out together.” He shakes his head sadly.
“I couldn’t have that. If Bill broke, everything broke.
So Bill’s hotel room had to have a little problem.
Susan, bless her, was tougher than she looked.
She held on long enough that I had to make another call I didn’t want to make.
That one hurt me. I liked Suze. We summered together in the Hamptons for thirty years. ”
My breath is trickling in and out of my lungs, just enough to keep me conscious and upright but not nearly enough to stave off the feelings of my world caving in all around me.
“Now, we come to you.” His eyes settle on me.
There’s nothing kind in them anymore, no matter how soft his voice stays.
“You were never the plan, Cassandra. You were the frame . A pretty face on a courtroom sketch. The boys downtown were going to do their work — Mr. Satyrin in particular was going to do his —and you were going to wake up next to a corpse. Which, frankly, would have been a kinder fate than this one.” He gestures lazily around the depressing room.
we’re in “But, ah… men . It’s not just women—we menfolk get sentimental, too.
Mr. Satyrin took a long look at you and lost sight of his mission. ”
My stomach kicks at that. I shove it down. The baby doesn’t need to hear any of this.
“So we improvised,” he concludes. “And here we are.”
There’s a long pause. He’s giving me the floor. Your turn, sweetheart. Dance for me. Make it pretty.
A lot of things could be said here, in the gap that follows.
I don’t know how many of them would ever matter.
It’s clear to me that DeMaris has made up his mind and nothing I tell him will change it.
He knows what he wants and where he intends to shuffle me next. I’m just one more item in a ledgerbook.
And if that’s the case, well, fuck it. Why bother making it easy for him?
No, I won’t go quietly. I’ll fight until the end. I’ll scratch and claw at his throat.
And yes, I’m sure the prison guards will come tear me off of him and beat me senseless.
And yes, I’m sure he’ll still get his way—my baby gone, me locked up for good.
And yes, it will be a pointless fight, a forgotten one, because no one will ever see or hear of me again.
But if I die here and now, I want it to be said aloud one more time why I did it.
“Did you know I had a sister?”
His eyebrows lift with mild interest. “I don’t believe I did.”
“Giana.” Her name in this room, in this air, with him sitting in it, is almost more than I can stand. “Giana Madden. She died five years ago.”
He nods, polite, bored. “My condolences.”
“She paid for my life,” I tell him. “Because she loved me and I loved her so, so much. She had one of those laughs that could fill a room. I know that’s a cheesy thing to say, but she really did.
I’d do some really terrible things just to hear that laugh one more time.
” Swallowing past the lump in my throat, I press on.
“She worked some hard jobs. She did it to keep us whole and safe, a roof over my head, all those good things, and she never, ever complained. Until five years ago. She had an appointment with a rough regular at a hotel uptown. He was drunk and demanding things he had no right to demand, and when she said no, he hit her. She fell and cracked her skull on the corner of the bathtub, and—to skip to the end here—he left her there to die. That man’s name was Raymond Snyder. ”
I watch DeMaris for that. For the flicker. For the oh.
And I get it, just for a second. The smallest tilt of his head, the briefest narrowing of his eyes. He’s recalibrating something.
A piece of the puzzle has just clicked, and he doesn’t like that it was set in place by me.
“Ah,” he says finally. “So that’s why.” He whistles, impressed. “That is a long con, Cassandra. You poor thing. I hate to see you stumble at the finish line. Breaks my heart, truly.”
He says it like a compliment. Like he’s seeing me for the first time, and what he sees, he respects.
If only the feeling were mutual.
“I don’t want your respect,” I retort. “I want you dead in a ditch.”
DeMaris chuckles again. “Now, now. That’s no way to talk to a man who’s offering you a future.”
He settles back in his seat like we have all the time in the world.
Maybe he does.
But I don’t.
I narrow my eyes. “I’m not losing my child,” I inform him. “So you can take your deal, Senator, fold it until it’s all corners, and then shove it up your ass.”
He sighs. “That is disappointing,” he concludes, “but not entirely unexpected . ” He reaches inside his suit jacket. “I had a feeling we might end up here.”
What he draws out is small and neatly packaged. A syringe with a glistening metal tip. Inside, I can see a clear liquid. So innocent-looking. I have a sick and almost certainly accurate feeling about what will happen if that liquid goes inside my veins.
“It’s already written,” he says apologetically as he rips open the package and uncaps the syringe.
“The story, I mean. Inmate Snyder, eight weeks pregnant, distraught after her arraignment, somehow acquires a controlled substance from a fellow inmate. Such a tragedy. The warden’s office will issue a statement.
There’ll be a small piece in the Metro section.
Your cousin Daniela will give a tearful quote, I imagine.
Pretty girl, your cousin. I had my people pull her file. ”
I keep my expression steady. I will not give him the satisfaction of widening my eyes in horror.
“It’s a fast one,” he explains, lifting the syringe a little and sloshing its contents around inside so I can see. “I’m not a cruel man, Cassandra. I want you to know that. I had them choose something fast. You won’t suffer.”
“How kind.”
He smiles. “I like to think so.”
He stands.
He’s taller than I remembered from the wedding, or maybe it’s just that he’s so much taller than me right now, with my back against a stone wall and my hands hanging useless at my sides. Even now, he looks almost presidential.
Some people just have the gift of aura, I suppose. Halfway to the murder of a pregnant woman and he still just has the glow.
“Nothing but a tiny prick in the thigh,” he says. “Less of a scene that way. We’ll get you onto the bed first. The story’s tidier if you’re already lying down when Collins finds you.”
He flicks the side of the syringe twice with his fingernail. A small bead of liquid blooms at the tip and runs down the side of the needle.
“Come here, sweetheart.”
I don’t.
He sighs again, that toddler-refusing-to-eat-her-broccoli sigh, and takes a step toward me.
Inside my head, very far away, the screaming has stopped. There’s only one voice left, and it isn’t mine, and it isn’t even Giana’s.
It’s lower than that. Quieter. A voice I’d never heard until eight weeks ago, when I stepped into a bar with murder on my mind.
Dikarka, it says, now is when you fight.
So when DeMaris takes his second step, with the syringe held delicately between his fingers?—
I move.